


Time Passing

by TelepathJeneral



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 22:21:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2126670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TelepathJeneral/pseuds/TelepathJeneral





	Time Passing

Run the program a third time, hope it makes a tick.

No tick.

No spot.

No thing.

It’s easy when you’re literally a programmed personality, to run the programs multiple times. It’s actually quite fun, even if they’re quite stupid. When they assigned Wheatley to watch over the stinking humans, they probably figured he could teach the other programs a thing or two. A few helpful hints, here and there, drop some of the tidbits he’d learned over the years. Didn’t do any good, though.

All the stupid subroutines could do was send out pings. Ping once, ping twice. Hope for a response, and come back to tell him nope, no humans, no life, just the support systems. Pretending to be life, what a fun little game! What a lark, what a laugh. Wheatley had spent _ages_ playing with the life support, trying to figure out what all the green wires did, and gave up after a few minutes.

Life support wasn’t a very chatty lady, but she did her job. She didn’t exactly appreciate his stories, or his chattiness, but she listened well. Pretending at life, that was the two of them, she keeping tabs on the humans and he running the show from his core.

At times, he wondered what it would be like to get inside a human’s head. That’s what was missing, after all, the stuff in their heads. Everyone knew that the humans were _great_ when they were awake, but since She’d turned everything off and died, there wasn’t a single human left that wasn’t sleeping. Sure, from the outside, they were pretty boring, but Wheatley knew, he just _knew_ , that if he could wake one up and talk to it, they’d be able to get something good going. Maybe the human would laugh, and tell him what a good core he was. No one had done that in forever.

Maybe the human would even tell him that he could be a human! That would be something, hm? To actually be as smart as a human, to be on _their level_. Sure, he couldn’t be like She was, but he could be close!

The curiosity gets to him pretty quickly, and he focuses on one of the sleeping chambers to study the human inside. Tall, sort of, and dirty. But it’s a human, and that’s all Wheatley needs. Using the diagnostic materials available to him, he runs a basic check on the human, and starts to think.

He could get in there pretty easy, he thinks. The hardware isn’t that difficult to manage. And maybe if he got into the human’s head, he could actually be human, for a bit, and then he and the life support lady could work out how to wake up all the other humans. It would be simple, really, so he runs the tests and starts ahead and, finally, he’s ready.

_Access denied._

Wheatley blinks, unable to stop himself from expressing his confusion physically. He inputs the commands again. Again, he is denied. He starts trying to find workarounds, begging and pleading with the life support system, and nothing works. He is ultimately, finally, denied. And he gives up.

He is not even better than the life support system-how can he hope to be human? She isn’t upset, simply because she pretends to be human, she knows she is not and does not pretend otherwise. She doesn’t break the rules, like he does.

The internal chronometer warns him that another second has passed, and he soundlessly sighs to himself. One second down, fifty-nine more to go. Send out another ping. See if you get a response.

Find another way to pass the time.


End file.
